36 Kr starter | The former Ele.me start-up team entered the carbon neutrality market, and "Carbon Scale Technology" completed tens of millions of angel rounds of financing

Text | Su Jianxun

36Kr learned that carbon neutral digital solution service provider "Carbon Scale Technology" announced that it has received tens of millions of yuan of angel round financing, led by Yuanhe Origin. Previously, in August last year, "Carbon Scale Technology" had received seed financing from Ele.me co-founder Wang Yuan. "Carbon Scale Technology" officially said that the new round of financing will be mainly used for team development, product iteration and market development.

Founded in August 2021, CEO Yanxiang Huang yanxiang worked for the world's 500 reinforcement giant Dow DuPont for nearly 10 years, responsible for managing new business in China, and held positions in pipe training, sales, marketing, and products. He has been included in the Forbes China 30 Under 30 Elite List and the Hurun Under30s Entrepreneurial Leaders List, with rich industry and management experience.

With the announcement of General Secretary Xi Jinping's goal of "2030 carbon peak, 2060 carbon neutrality" and the opening of the national carbon emissions trading market, Huang Yanxiang's past customers and partners have emerged a lot of inquiries about "how enterprises can digitally reduce emissions", which gave him the idea of creating carbon scale technology.

"For many enterprises, the annual carbon emission cost that needs to be fixed to perform the contract may reach tens of millions or even hundreds of millions, if you do not introduce digital, intelligent and innovative tool management to accurately reduce carbon, the operating cost of carbon management of enterprises will become higher and higher." Huang Yanxiang told 36 Krypton.

The clear landing of the policy has made many enterprises (especially those with high energy consumption using traditional energy) have a more urgent demand for emission reduction, which has also spawned the rapid expansion of the "double carbon" market, according to deloitte and Everbright Securities statistics, the current "carbon neutral" overall market size will reach 116 trillion yuan. All enterprises are facing the pressure of deep decarbonization transformation in the context of "carbon neutrality", among which the need to inventory, monitor and reduce carbon emissions has become particularly important under the pressure of compliance supervision.

This is also the perspective that "Carbon Scale Technology" wants to enter as a start-up company, through digital software tools/SaaS and other forms of services, the introduction of big data, artificial intelligence, blockchain and other cutting-edge technologies to empower, "Carbon Scale Technology" can provide customers with low-carbon digital and in-depth intelligent management analysis platform, help enterprises quantify their own carbon emissions, while accurate analysis, integration of ecological chain partners to provide a series of solutions for enterprises to reduce carbon.

In terms of specific product forms, "Carbon Scale Technology" can flexibly provide customized privatization deployments or lightweight SaaS delivery according to the size and demand of customers. Taking a new energy vehicle customer as an example, because there are thousands of automotive product parts, in the past, a car to calculate the amount of carbon reduction, manufacturers need to dock parts dealers one by one to collect information, and now only need to unite the upstream and downstream of automobile manufacturers, with a set of digital products can be collaboratively collected, synchronously calculated the emissions and carbon reduction status of the upstream and downstream industrial chain.

"It can be understood that in the field of digital management of carbon emissions, enterprises also need professional digital tools to do internal management similar to carbon assets," Huang Yanxiang concluded.

Schematic diagram of carbon scale technology products

In addition, due to the new rise of the industry, many enterprises' computing standards, emission reduction specifications are not standardized enough, in order to ensure that the data is accurate, "Carbon Scale Technology" in addition to the joint third-party verification agencies to ensure the authority of enterprise emission reduction data information, but also introduced the blockchain distributed data storage technology, on the one hand through encryption to ensure the security of enterprise emission reduction data, in addition to also allowing enterprises upstream and downstream data to have immutability, to prevent some enterprises in order to meet the emission reduction standards to modify the data themselves.

Although "Carbon Scale Technology" has not been established for a long time, the customer industries involved have spread across the chemical industry, manufacturing, government parks, construction, banking and finance, insurance, etc. Huang Yanxiang told 36Kr that most companies face carbon reduction pressure from three aspects: 1, companies such as Apple continue to transmit carbon reduction pressure to supply chain manufacturers, requiring alignment of carbon reduction standards; 2, enterprises included in the carbon trading market need to fulfill their contracts every year and need to pay carbon quota costs; 3, enterprises involved in import and export trade will soon face huge risks of cross-border carbon taxes.

Talking about the difficulties of the industry, Huang Yanxiang believes that the current challenge focuses on the satisfaction of the differentiated needs of enterprises and industries, due to the urgency of different enterprises to reduce emissions, the calculation process is different, coupled with the customer's expectations for carbon management are not clear, the main energy of "carbon scale technology" is also to extract most of the industry commonalities, to provide more standard product modules for various industries.

In terms of business model, the revenue of "Carbon Scale Technology" comes from the payment of enterprises for services such as software/SaaS for carbon management digital services on the one hand, and on the other hand, it will carry out the output of the complete set of solutions through the integrated deployment of software and hardware transformation required for the overall green transformation of enterprises involved in a deeper level.

"In the next decade, China will certainly produce a unicorn of world-class digital enterprise carbon management." Huang Yanxiang said.

In terms of team, in addition to Huang Yanxiang as co-founder & CEO, Li Lei, former R&D director of Ele.me, is the co-founder &CTO of "Carbon Scale Technology", and former BASF executive Zhang Aopeng is the partner & solution VP. At present, the "Carbon Scale Technology" team is about 30 people, of which product research and development accounts for more than 90%.